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Talk:Boomers
I wonder if there would be a baby boom in the Southern Victory Series post-war or if the greater loss of life in North America would butterfly that out. :Never thought of that. No way to say, really. Turtle Fan (talk) 14:39, April 28, 2013 (UTC) :Its possible it occured in the US as in OTL but delayed in the CS. A quick bit of googling found a wiki article that suggests it started in the UK immediately after WW II but was delayed a decade in Gemany. Something similar might have happened in TL-191. ML4E (talk) 18:05, April 28, 2013 (UTC) :Although the Baby Boom came about in Germany following the economic recovery in the mid-50s. I doubt that there would be any such economic recovery in the TL-191 confederacy since the US would have no real need to implement a Marshell Plan of sorts in the forer CSA without any competitors. In which case the former CSA might end up impovrished and without any real economic conditions for a demographic buldge. ::West Germany benefited from heavy investment mainly because NATO felt it needed all the allies it could get, and that anyone willing to align with it both needed and deserved to be strengthened, especially in Central Europe. That's not the only reason to rebuild a place like that, however. Having an economically depressed region on your border will invariably bog down your own economic plans: You need to accomodate a refugee crisis, or else you need to beef up border security as chasing refugees off becomes a major undertaking; you need to worry about smuggling, human trafficking, and other crime creeping across the border; if your disadvantaged neighbor has anything worth trading for, you have to go a lot farther out of your way to get it, since he's too poor to refine it himself; if things get really grim and miserable, a revolution could occur, and then who knows what sort of deeply unpleasant regime you'll end up having to deal with right next door. Rubbing a defeated enemy's nose in his loss is fun for a little while, but the thrill wears off quickly, and then comes the realization that helping him find some stability offers more gains than losses, especially when one factors in peace of mind. That's why the former Entente stopped enforcing the most punitive measures of Versailles, and why the Soviets helped Germany subvert it, though by then it was too late. It's why the Congress of Vienna showed restraint fromthe outset in exacting reparations from France, for a more successful example. There are many other examples I could name, from antiquity through the Renaissance on to the Cold War's aftermath. Turtle Fan (talk) 23:34, April 29, 2013 (UTC) ::That actually makes a lot of sense come to think of It. Maybe the US would invest more in rebuilding the south then, and perhaps reward occupied territories with either statehood or independance for good behavior. If HT hadn't killed young Jimmy Carter off I thought he'd make a good Confederate analogy of Willy Brandt. ::::It will get worse before it gets better, I fear. It was looking like the only Sotherners the US was willing to play ball with were the black minority, and understandably, racial divisions are an inestimably huge cleavage in that society. ::::I've been working lately on a side project about white Southern unionism during the OTL war. Their contribution was far more significant, even decisive, than is generally realized. The main reason for that is that Reconstruction governments left them hanging; some wanted to promote black, and thus Republican, interests at all costs; others wanted to declare victory and stop pouring money into the expensive occupation, and that meant reaching an accomodation with former Rebs whether they were ready to act in good faith or not. Both sides produced conditions that were toxic for white unionists, so they downplayed their wartime affiliation and joined with one side or the other, but usually the Democrats. So they did not speak up when the Lost Cause crowd started writing revisionist history, and the myth that white and Southern had meant secessionist took hold. In fact one white soldier in nine from the seceding states fought for the US (one in three of all soldiers born in slave states, including blacks and border staters); if Southern solidarity had been as complete as Jubal Early claimed, the Rebs would most likely have neutralized the Federal numbers advantage and outlasted the Northern and Western political will for the conflict. The ACW really is something of a contradiction to the old saw about winners writing history. The winners of Reconstruction, maybe. Turtle Fan (talk) 01:14, May 1, 2013 (UTC) ::::Pretty interesting tidbit about southern unionism. I didn't know too much about it but I seem to recall reading that a lot of it was in appalachia and northern Alabama, along with the area of Tennessee that was one of the only Republican parts of the south until the post-Civil Rights backlash. (Donut) :::::The two main enclaves were in western Virginia, which eventually became West Virginia but first created a shadow government which was recognized by Washington as the legitimate government of the entire state of Virginia, and eastern Tennessee, which tried to follow West Virginia's example but was unable to do so because it was surrounded on all sides by Confederate strongholds. It was proposed that East Tennessee would also annex highland Unionist counties on its borders from North Carolina, Georgia, and Alabama. Tennessee unionists did launch a successful sabotage campaign which cut the main rail line connecting Richmond to the Gulf states, and Federal recruiting agents in Tennessee ultimately raised 40,000 soldiers despite having no state government to support them. (Virginia raised 30,000 with the support of the Restored Government and then of West Virginia.) :::::Winston County, Alabama was even farther from the Union Army and was the only unionist county in its region of the state, but that one county resolved simply to ignore the state's writ of secession and somehow held off every attempt by the Rebel army to force them to accept it. And yes, they voted GOP while the rest of the South, including other former Unionist strongholds, were solidly Democratic. (Though the Solid South started breaking up long before the Southern Strategy; Harding won Tennessee in 1920, Hoover won five former Confederate states in 1928, and though the next few elections were Democratic landslides nationally, historians generally see this as the beginning of the end.) :::::In North Carolina a secret society of guerrillas, spies and saboteurs made themselves such a nuisance that Lee actually took men off the line during the seige of Petersburg to launch a campaign against them. In Arkansas and Louisiana so many voters signed Oaths of Allegiance that they were allowed to hold elections for civilian governors who were recognized by the White House. Recruiters in Alabama raised a huge regiment, more than 1500 men, that had a reputation as one of the Union's elite cavalry units; they served as Sherman's headquarters guard during the March to the Sea. At Fort Jackson, one of the forts that was supposed to defend New Orleans against Farragut's fleet, the garrison mutinied as soon as US ships were sighted, arrested their officers, spiked their guns in case the Confederates regained control of the fort, and raised the white flag. And that's just white people in seceding states; I haven't even begun looking at escaped/liberated slaves or the unionists in the border states who defeated local secessionists outright. :::::3,000,000 soldiers fought in the Civil War, 900,000 in the Confederate army and 2,100,000 in the Union army. 450,000 of the latter were from slave states: 100,000 white soldiers from states which seceded, 200,000 white soldiers from the border states, and 150,000 black soldiers born into slavery. :::::As an AH exercise, let's subtract them and the Union Army is down to 165,000. The black soldiers would not have joined the Confederate army, of course, and wouldn't have been allowed to even if they'd wanted to for some bizarre reason. But (assuming all the slave states seceded), those 300,000 white soldiers would have raised the Confederates' numerical strength to 1,200,000. That gives the Union a numerical advantage of a hair over 4:3. (In OTL it was 7:3.) Given that the Union's war aims were necessarily more ambitious than the Confederacy's, that the Union was faced with an offensive war, and especially that most Union strategists were not that efficient at capitalizing on their numbers advantage at all, I don't think it's at all unfair to suggest that, if the war truly had been merely North (including states that would more properly be described as West) versus South, the Confederates would certainly have won. Turtle Fan (talk) 05:02, May 2, 2013 (UTC) :::My two cents: sex is a good way to celebrate victory and drown one's sorrows. Men coming home to the women on the homefront would probably create many opportunities for baby-making. It would certainly be smaller than in OTL by virtue of the fact that there are (presumably) fewer people in North America in TL-191, of course, but a small boom is plausible. TR (talk) 03:01, April 30, 2013 (UTC) :It still could happen in the US though, and i've often thought that one final TL-191 novel to show what the world was like in perhaps the late 1960s would be interesting. (Donut) ::Oh Lord, not you too? A few weeks ago we had a kid here (he actually made a user page and sort of said he was a troubled teen, so I went easier on him than I might have) who made some grandiose blog post about how Turtledove has betrayed us by writing TWTPE instead of endless 191 volumes detailing the "obvious" conflicts with Japan, Germany, Britain, and Russia. Turtle Fan (talk) 23:34, April 29, 2013 (UTC) ::Haha, I saw that kid. His posting style made me laugh and reminded me of myself when I was younger. Maybe he's just sad that he doesn't have any new books in the series to look forward to. I think that it would just be interesting to see how HT himself envisioned the future playing out, but it does seem to be past the point where there would be anything remotely parallel to OTL, culturally or politically since Rock and Roll probably gets butterflied out for obvious reasons. I guess the only thing would be if HT increased Cold War tensions between the US and Germany. Maybe it's just more interesting for us to speculate ourself though. I've grown past the point where I feel the need for everything to be really twee. Things being different is part of the fun of alternate history. (Donut) :::You're not suggesting that every single cultural and political development of the past 70 years all comes down to rock and roll, are you? :::No, that was just the first thing that came to mind. Obviously there will be a lot of significant butterflies and cultural changes worldwide. Pop music being very different is one of the most glaring examples. I noticed that even in the 1920s there was a scene where Morrell was at a dance, dancing a Waltz so early on music was probably behind what it was OTL. (Donut) :::Me, I have no interest in 191's future, and given that the story's premise has reached its natural conclusion, I don't think HT ever gave it any thought either. If pressed I expect he'd roll out some cheap off brand cold war with Germany, which is what the kid was so eager to see. That makes no sense, though. The world at the end of 191 is a lot bigger than OTL at the same point, too big for a superpower to think of dominating it. Control of this world is achieved through cooperation among regional powers. :::At the point in US history where we in OTL got interested in global imperialism, this US was still struggling to secure its borders; and in IatD, that struggle's only just ended. They may attempt to dominate Latin America, but they haven't even shown any interest in pushing the Japanese frontier any farther west, so expanding their sphere of influence to the Eurasian land mass is simply not going to happen. Meanwhile, Germany might go back to fucking around in the Andean States, but nothing serious; history has shown that dominating Europe and simultaneously building a significant empire elsewhere is nigh on impossible. The British, the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Vikings, even the Romans in their various incarnations all had to choose between one goal or the other. They all ran up against the same obstacles, and those would be present for Germany as well. :::Since the end of GWI the political systems have been very different, but that doesn't equate to ideological conflict. Nor is there any really compelling source of economic conflict, either. I see little reason they should compete and less still to care if they do. Turtle Fan (talk) 01:14, May 1, 2013 (UTC)